Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content

Accidental Genius introduces freewriting, a technique for accessing your unconscious mind to generate ideas and solutions. The book addresses how an internal editor within us constrains thinking by enforcing conventional standards of grammar, spelling, and social acceptability—limitations that can prevent creative breakthroughs when facing complex problems. Freewriting works by writing as quickly as possible about a subject you care about while deliberately ignoring standard writing rules. Because your internal editor cannot keep pace with rapid output, you generate ideas and solutions that conventional thinking cannot produce. The book presents six core secrets to freewriting, along with fifteen problem-solving and creativity-stimulating principles. This edition includes seven new principles and an extensive section on refining raw freewriting into polished, shareable content. The techniques apply to generating ideas for books, articles, blog posts, and solving business problems.